


Two Idiots With No Social Skills

by TallysGreatestFan



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Meditation, autistic Tilly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 07:58:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14208684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TallysGreatestFan/pseuds/TallysGreatestFan
Summary: Sylvia Tilly asks Michael for help in dealing with the stress they are exposed to





	Two Idiots With No Social Skills

She tried to concentrate, but another sleepless night was just to much, and her thoughts started to drift again. How she had imagined to modify their warp drive so that the sensors of the pre-warp civilization they were studying wouldn’t detect them. How naïve she had been. 

She stared to the other bed. Michael sat there calmly, not even a hint of what she was feeling showing in her face. Sylvia had long ago learned not to trust her ability to read faces, but damn, how could she be so calm when they had seen the terrible disfigured corpses of dozen Starfleet officers, when they had escaped an monster just barely.

Michael opened her eyes and loosened her meditation stance.

,,Uhm, if you have time, could you maybe teach me this?”, Michael stared piercingly at her, ,,I… I mean, just the basics, I am aware that one needs a lifetime of training to come this far, and that you, uhm, that I will never come to your level of being controlled, but I just have to many feelings concerning yesterday, and I want to be able to do my work normally, and…. okay, I ramble to much again…”

Michael blinked: ,,Didn’t you say yesterday that you ,love feeling feelings’?”

,,Yeah, but the good ones, you know, not this stuff.” Great, Sylvia, you just confused another person with your weird not-neurotypical emotions…

,,This seems like an normal reaction to traumatic events.”, Michael said instead. She slipped of her bed with the same controlled elegance Silvia envied her sometimes. 

,,Have you any prior experience with mediation?”

Should she be open about her diagnostic? But then, this was Michael Burnham, the mutineer, being Asperger autistic was hardly an thrilling secret compared to this. ,,Some simple relaxing techniques like progressive muscle relaxation or the 5-4-3-2-1-exercise, where you count five things you see, then five you hear, then five you feel, and then four, and so one.”

Michael seemed just a tiny bit delighted about that.

,,This is a good starting point. As you said, you would need years of hard practice to come to the level of controlledness a Vulcan processes, but I assume you don’t actually want to reach this?”

,,No. Just being able to endure all of this. Thank you.”

,,Find a comfortable place to sit down.”

She sat down cross-legged on her bed.

,,Close your eyes.”

She assumed that for most people, closing their eyes was comforting, but for her it just made things worse, because there were no outher stimuli divert her mind from her own painful thoughts anymore.

,,It isn’t bad if there are indeed still thoughts, just watch them, don’t validate them.”

Oh, there were a lot of thoughts, flashes of the dead bodies and things she had heard in the news and how she, Tilly, failed to help serving Starfleet better because she was so bad at social things. But she tried to not become angry at herself because she was failing at this, but simply watch, as Michael had told her. She imagined an force field between her and the thoughts, behind which she watched, unaffected.

,,Breath. In. Out. In. Out. Calmly and slowly.”

It did help. It did not expel all her incriminating thoughts, but it did make them… lesser close, somehow. The panic lifted like an dark curtain, and with it the feeling that her head was filled with cotton wool, and she was almost able to think normally again.  
She breathed further, in and out, listening to Michaels calm breath and feeling her presence closely beside her.   
After a while, it became a bit boring, but it was such a nice piece of peace, and when had actually been the last time that she did something with a friend?

Finally, she heard Michael say: ,,Now open your eyes. Slowly. Come back to the outer world. Loose your posture.”

And Sylvia untied her legs from being tailor-fashion and shook her arms.

,,You will need some time until you manage this just as good alone as you did under my instruction. This is normal, do not blame yourself.”

,,Thank you very much.”, Sylvia realized that her voice sounded a lot less hysterical and shrill than before, ,,I guess now I’m almost fit for company again…”

Michaels dark brown eyes pierced her, her lips quirked to something that could almost be a smile.

,,If you are trying to understand human social behaviors, you are taking lessons with the wrong person.”

Sylvia laughed, equally compassionate and delighted: ,,Well, we could just try to help each other, couldn’t we?”

**Author's Note:**

> Just a tiny scene I had in my head since their friendship started. I think all this traumatic events must be really hard for Tilly and Michael knows probably some good ways in dealing with it, being so much longer in Starfleet and culturally Vulcan. 
> 
> As Asperger, seeing Tilly on TV was one of the first times that there was somebody represented like me who wasn’t male and wasn’t an arrogant, super controlled genius I could never become in terms of self-confidence and control over myself. And I just hope they make it canon and not delve into these disgusting, hurtful clichés. 
> 
> For the part where she describes her autism as a secret and something blemishing to tell: I know this is controversial, but what seems to be forgotten in this whole ,,autistic people don’t want the cure” debate is that there are indeed autistic people like me who would have done almost everything to get cured at some times of their lives. I’m not saying that it is something that has to be cured. I am simply saying that being autistic, being different and not fitting in can hurt terribly sometimes, that society puts so much pressure at being normal, and that it is more complicated and difficult than ,,nobody wants the cure”.


End file.
